I am using the acro package for acronyms because, for a phrase that is not a proper name, I can have the first letter of each word uncapitalized except when it starts off a sentence, in which case the very first letter of the phrase is capitalized. Like other packages, it allows user-specification of plural forms for the acronym and the long phrase. Unlike other packages, it provides these capabilities without having to externally make an index. It is not a full fledge glossary package, but it meets my needs for acronyms.

For the acro package, is there a way to italicize the first occurrence of the phrase, when the acronym is introduced, but without italicizing the acronym itself? The vanilla way of introducing a phrase and its acronym is \ac{label}, which expands to the phrase followed by its acronym in brackets. The command \textit{\ac{label}} causes both the phrase and the acronym to be italicized.

I know that the acronym package (as opposed to the acro package) does the proper italicization with \acfi{label}, at least according to ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/pub//tex/macros/lat ... cronym.pdf. However, this is not recognized using the acro package.

I'm not sure if a MWE is needed for this question, but here is a toy
file:

Thanks, Gonzalo. At the risk of sounding demanding, I don't suppose one could control this on a per-acronym basis? I don't think its needed when the long phrase is a proper name. And there are some times when I don't want to emphatically pound the table (so to speak), which italics looks like. P.S. This thread is crossposted at latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=23865 P.P.S. Odd that a carriage return is interpretted as clicking on the post submission button when composing here.
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user36800Sep 17 '13 at 15:09

@user36800 you can specify long-format=<whatever> on a per acronym basis by setting it in \DeclareAcronym: \DeclareAcronym{aa}{ short = aa , long = AAAAAA , long-format = \itshape }
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clemensSep 17 '13 at 16:03